Ardour Development

Who Did This?

Ardour is a collaborative software development effort, representing the work of many people.

The Roadmap

Most of the design and development of Ardour happens in realtime via
discussions on IRC. You won't see anything on this website, and very
little on any of the mailing lists, that will indicate new designs and
new ideas that we are working on. IRC allows the core developers to
chat in realtime (or somewhat asynchronously, which is useful too),
and hash out hard issues without the delays caused by email
back-and-forth delays.

At present, there is no roadmap for future development, but there
probably should be. This list is about as close as it gets.

Getting Involved

Ardour is written in C++ (with a little C and assembler thrown in
where it makes sense). The graphical user interface is written using
the gtkmm C++ "wrapper" around the GTK+ toolkit. The codebase is
currently at about 160,000 lines of code, which includes some 3rd
party C++ libraries. The user interface alone is about 48,000 lines
while the backend ("engine") weighs in at about 34,000 lines. Ardour
makes heavy use of libsigc++ as a way to provide anonymous coupling
between components, particulular between the backend and user
interface. The code makes heavy use of the Model-View-Controller
programming model, and attempts to draw from the best work on
programming pattern languages.

Reports about crashes with no further information is rarely helpful to
the developers. You can give better crash reports if you're able to
create backtraces of the crashes. Information on how to do that is
available here.